Apple Panel on Options Backs Chief — Apple Computer said Friday that a special committee of its board had found that its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, was not responsible for improper dating of stock options at the company. To account for the backdating, Apple restated its financial reporting …

Apple faces suit over iPod-iTunes link — NEW YORK - As if its options woes weren't trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players.

Google's Tipping Point — Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called "Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose". He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain …

AT& T Completes BellSouth Takeover — The Federal Communications Commission yesterday overcame a seven-month deadlock and approved AT&T's $85 billion purchase of BellSouth, creating a new corporate giant that will stand astride the telecommunications industry like none other in the generation since …

Virtual reality to get its own network? — A nonprofit group says it plans to build a network called Neuronet purely to support virtual-reality game and business applications. — Neuronet, which is planned to be separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable …

Is Neuronet A Scam? {Update 5} — There's a bit of press (hype?) making the rounds on something called Neuronet (Link or maybe this Link), a supposed plan for a fiber optic-based, virtual reality-centric network intended to be separate from what we now call the Internet.

Looking at Fiji and Vienna — Windows Vista has been released for a month now to business, and is going to be released to the general public in a month (January 30). For those who haven't been following Vista's development, it is worh noting that even though Vista comes 5 years after XP, it is a rushed product.

Can Google Come Out to Play? — ON a Thursday afternoon before the holidays, the game room at Google's new offices in Chelsea was being put to good use. Two engineers were taking a break from coding at the pool table. A programmer in a purple Phish T-shirt was practicing juggling.

Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007 — Here are some predictions for 2007: — Google Stock Hits $1,000 per Share — Internet Traffic Doubles ... to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent.

Top Xbox Live Games of 2006 — Here are the top games for 2006, based on Xbox Live connectivity. — The following rankings are based on data collected from 1/1/06 - 12/29/06: — 2006 Top Xbox 360 Titles (UU's) — 1 — Gears of War — 2 — Hexic HD — 3 — Call of Duty 2

NASA's vision lost on Web generation — CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show. — Concerned about this lack of interest …

AdSense Blacklist to Increase Revenue — Oliver Gassner pointed me to AdsBlacklist.com, a service which generates a list of URLs based on a URL and a set of keywords you provide. You can then copy & paste this list into your Google AdSense competitive ad filter* to (supposedly) …

How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer — Comment We're continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I'd argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals …

Google Video Contact Manager — Google Video has a new feature that lets you send a link to a video much more easily. Google Video already had a way to share videos, but you had to type emails and the autocomplete was barely usable. — Now you can see all your contacts or just the most contacted …